In Terms of More Bollocks

Joanna Gosling on BBC World News just now, interviewing someone about Ratko Mladic: "How will it unfold from now in terms of timescale?"  = How long will it take.

In Terms of Bollocks

The expression "In terms of" has during my lifetime gone from being one you heard very occasionally and almost always in its true sense - the value system used to assess, compare or describe something - to being one which most journalists and presenters use with wild abandon as a nominative particle, preposition, conjunction  or just about any other part of speech you can think of. Some can hardly get through a sentence without using it, and some use it several times in a single sentence.  Some go to enormous lengths to mangle their sentences in order to work it in.  

The worst culprit of all is the BBC's Matthew Amroliwala, who uses it in the most tedious and ludicrously unnecessary ways in every bulletin.  Today's classic from him came in his report of the arrest of Ratko Mladic: "It has been two decades in terms of time since ...."  He seems to be completely unaware what total bollocks he is talking.  

The cancer has now spread from the media to the general public with every Tom, Dick and Harry using it because they think that if the media use it it must be sophisticated.

Does anyone know what started this epidemic?  My gut instinct is that it must have been bashed into the heads of students on journalism courses as the smart phrase to use when you haven't got the time, or can't be bothered, or are too illiterate, to think what the right phrase is.  If so, it's completely backfired now because they are all trying so hard to use it that their speech has become not shorter but longer, more convoluted, and totally devoid of the elegance and style on which newspapers and broadcasters of old used to pride themselves.  It is impoverishing the English language.  I do wish the BBC would set an example by banning its use, even if that means Matthew Amoraliwala would be reduced to just staring at the camera and trying to think of something else to say.

Female Bird, Learning Difficulties and Older People

Alice Thomson tells us in The Times this morning that "If Mr Clarke wants to cut the prison population he should concentrate on white collar criminals, women prisoners, drug addicts and the mentally ill".  Do you like the way women deserve automatically to be considered for shorter sentences just by virtue of their sex?

Mind you, at least she uses the term "mentally ill", unlike her colleague Anushka Asthana in the next column who, like just about everyone else in medialand, insists on calling it "learning difficulties".  You regularly hear people who are nearer the grave than the classroom referred to as people with "learning difficulties". This is now backfiring on itself because you can't talk about someone's learning difficulties in the proper sense of the term - I had a lot of trouble learning algebra for example - without risking giving the impression that they are not just not quite as bright as some of their classmates but clinically retarded.

This politically correct bullshit is now going completely mad.  I was recently firmly chastised at a public meeting for referring to "the elderly".  I should call then "older people" I was told.  Older than who for Christ's sake? 

Why can't we call a spade a spade anymore?  Do the people themselves or their families really give a toss?

God Save Our Gracious Judges

I found it hard to keep down the contents of my stomach this morning reading and viewing the nauseating hypocrisy and egotism pouring out from media and politicians alike over the injunctions issue.  
 
It is absolutely crystal clear that the private life of a soccer star has absolutely nothing to do with the public interest. 

It is equally absolutely crystal clear that the fact that anyone can read all the details on the web does not mean that the judge should remove the injunction so the media can jump on the bandwagon.  Tweeters are in it just for the hell of it.  The media are in it for the money, and it is their money that fans the flames and causes people to seek to sell for massive profit and with increasing frequency private information in which the public interest is 100% prurient. 

Media whining about freedom of speech, and about it's being only the rich and famous who can afford protection of their private lives by the courts, is just so much hyprocritical guff.  It is only the rich and famous who need the protection of the courts.  The media are not interested in the private lives of the poor and obscure precisely because there is no money in it for them.

Parliament has created laws, or acquiesced in their creation by the EU, which require judges to protect citizens from breaches of their privacy except where such breaches are necessary in the genuine public interest.  If Parliament thinks judges are misinterpreting those laws it can and should legislate to change them. For a peer and an MP to second guess a judgment behind the shield of parliamentary privilege is just totally shameless attention-seeking revealing egos the size of barns and total disregard for the Rule of Law which is the vital foundation for all our freedoms.


Nor is this confined to soccer players.  Publication of information about someone's sex life, whether extra-marital or not, can be justified if the person concerned has preached publicly against such activity, or has invited people to vote for him on the basis of public statements condemning such activity by others.  In virtually no other circumstances can its publication be justified - and I include in this the Goodwin/RBS case; you have to be pretty dim to think his affair could possibly have had any bearing at all on his decision to buy ABN Ambro and thus bankrupt RBS.  If you believe some of the guff being written about the Goodwin case now you would have to believe that John Major's pension should be docked because his affair with Edwina Currie may have caused Black Wednesday.